A former hotel worker has revealed the most cringe-worthy moments he's experienced on the job. Photo / 123RF
A former hotel worker has revealed the most cringe-worthy moments he's experienced on the job. Photo / 123RF
Discovering a little too much about guests is just part of the job for hotel workers - and the more glitzy and luxurious the hotel is, the weirder the situations seem to get.
A former staffer at a five-star hotel in Brisbane has revealed the embarrassing moments and bizarre encounters he's had, including with celebrity guests.
The ex-room service attendant, who worked at the hotel for six years, told news.com.au a standout moment was accidentally walking in on an amateur porno being filmed while he was delivering a bottle of champagne to a swanky suite.
The worker said after his knocks on the door went unnoticed, he got the all-clear from the room service office to walk in the room according to the guests' request.
"As I opened the door and walked through the foyer of the suite, I could see a tripod with camera positioned towards the bed in the open-plan living room-bedroom area," the ex-staffer said.
"Sometimes companies book out the suites to do interviews so I thought that might have been it. But instead I see a threesome occurring - there were one male and two females - with a semi-professional-looking video camera in their suite. It was definitely not a professional movie.
"I left the whole room service trolley in the room as I exited pretty quickly, which is not the correct practice as we were supposed to set up the ice bucket and ask if the guests would like the champagne opened and poured."
According to a recent survey of more than 1000 Australian hotel guests by Expedia, one in six hotel guests have been caught in what they described as an embarrassing situation, including blocking the toilet or wetting the bed, trying to get into the wrong room and struggling to unlock a door because they were too drunk.
There's plenty of things that go on inside hotel rooms we'd rather not know about. Photo / 123RF
Some 15 per cent of survey participants admitted to being caught naked by room service, 10 per cent said they'd been caught with a vibrator in the room, and 10 per cent said they were sprung having sex on the balcony.
And it's those X-rated situations the Brisbane hotel worker said he'd witnessed too often, such as the time he had to ask guests to stop having sex in the hotel pool.
"It had a glass end so guests in the hotel next door could see everything and were complaining about the show," he said. "The couple didn't care much when I interrupted.
"We had a vibrator left behind with a red patent leather studded mask. The vibrator was so bizarre - it had two little eggs on the end of wire coming out of a separate battery pack which the housekeepers were very fascinated with."
Not all embarrassing moments have been X-rated - but they've been just as funny.
"We've had to charge numerous guests for ruining the bed sheets as they have so much fake tan on them," he said.
"One of my colleagues had to deal with a nude man who got locked out of his room while putting his room service tray out. He came down to reception covering himself asking for a replacement key.
"But people stuck in lifts is always a memorable experience. We had a lady who got stuck in the hotel lift after a music festival who was heavily intoxicated. I had to spend the whole time trying to calm her down over the phone as the technician worked on getting her out."
The former employee said he felt guests in five-star hotels were generally less embarrassed when caught in compromising positions.
"They are paying top dollar and think they can do anything and will do anything and generally have no shame about it," he said.
And yes - the hotel staff often got together to laugh about weird things guests did, he said.
The staff are definitely having a laugh about your embarrassing moments. Photo / 123RF
A-LIST GUESTS ARE EMBARRASSING TOO
The former worker also spilt the gossip on some of the hotel's A-list guests, which included former prime minister Julia Gillard and late opera tenor Luciano Pavarotti - who had a penchant for darkening his hair with charcoal.
"The bedhead of the suite was ruined as he used charcoal in his hair to make it black," he said of the opera legend's stay.
"When he was sitting up in the bed, the charcoal was absorbed into the antique Chinese silk of the bedhead, which at the end of this stay was ruined.
"It was too delicate to clean and the bedhead had to be replaced at the cost of the tenor, which was not cheap.
"When Cher stayed with us she requested we turn her adjoining suite into a gym. We pulled out all the furniture from the suite and rented her requested exercise equipment so she had a private gym. We then had to put all the furniture back in after her two night stay."
But it was the phony names superstar guests used to keep anonymous that were the most amusing, the worker said.
"I love some of their alias names - the best names included Ms Belle Star for Cher, Jane and Judy Jetson for Delta Goodrem and her mother [and] Green Day checked in as the dead presidents of the USA, such as Abraham Lincoln," he said.
